Oil

My bottle of Lebanese olive oil arrived today. So what does this have to do with games? In my new Phoenician D&D 4 campaign, the party hails from an ancient real-life village, now known as Hasbaya, but believed to have once been Baalgad. The olive oil I bought is from that same region and the photo on the bottle is of the citadel at Hasbaya. Olive oil production was the main industry thousands of years ago, as it is today. I thought it would be nice to start our first session with some local foods, maybe an appetizer of Hasbaya olive oil served with some traditional wheat bread. It's goofy, but it adds flavor to the game. Maybe I'll give an imperious NPC monologue about how the cities main concern is this, and not their troublesome adventurers exploits.

Getting the bottle was difficult. It took a while to hunt it down. At first the only place that sold this particular regional oil was a website in Beirut. In addition to my oil, I could purchase Al Qaeda videos and books on radical Islam. Hmm, maybe not the site I want to support. Eventually, after not finding the olive oil elsewhere, I gave in and decided to order it from radical central dot com. However, when I was ordering the olive oil on their website, someone else's information was cached in the checkout! It was probably a previous customer. So much for a secure transaction. I decided to pass. A couple days later I found a website in New York that carried the oil and the bottle arrived today.